USA TODAY publishes
columns by an assortment of writers, including weekly features by Al Neuharth,
Chuck Raasch and DeWayne Wickham, as well as pieces by members of our Board
of Contributors.

The Board, which was launched in 1996, is composed of more than 25 contributing
writers, whose interests range from education to religion to sports to the
economy. Their charge is to chronicle American culture by telling the stories,
large and small, that collectively make us what we are. The writers 
many of them well-known columnists, authors and thinkers  come from
all parts of the USA. While some of the writers have changed over the years,
the concept remains the same: providing readers with insights into how issues
and events impact their lives and culture.

Souheila
Al-Jadda

Souheila
Al-Jadda is a Peabody award-winning television producer and journalist on Link
TV.

Expertise: Islam,
American Muslims, women's rights and Middle
East politics.

Background: Al-Jadda
is a global expert in the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations. She is on
the board of directors of Illume Magazine, an award-winning, independent
Muslim magazine. Before joining Link TV, she worked for four years as a legislative
assistant for U.S. Rep. Dennis
Kucinich, D-Ohio.

Ross
K. Baker is professor of political science at New Jersey's Rutgers University.

Expertise: Politics,
Congress, presidential history.

Background:
Baker was senior adviser to Sen. Chuck
Hagel, R-Neb., in 2000, and filled the same position with Sen. Patrick
Leahy, D-Vt., in 2004. More recently, he was Scholar-in-Residence in the
office of Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid, D-Nev. He was a research associate at the Brookings
Institution before landing at Rutgers. He received his Ph.D. from the University
of Pennsylvania.

Books: The
4th edition of House & Senate (2008); Strangers on a Hill (2007).

Lionel
Beehner

Lionel
Beehner is a fellow with the Truman
National Security Project and a PhD candidate.

Expertise: Foreign
policy, International law.

Background: Beehner
previously worked as a senior writer for the Council
on Foreign Relations, where he is currently a term member. He is a contributor
to The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The (London) Guardian,
Foreign Affairs and Slate, and teaches an op-ed writing course
at Mediabistro.com. He has reported from Iraq, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Bosnia and
other post-conflict zones. His doctoral thesis will focus on violent non-state
actors and the use of force.

Rich Benjamin

Rich
Benjamin is an award winning scholar and multi-media journalist.

Expertise: Politics,
culture, foreign affairs

Background: Benjamins
analysis and commentary appear on MSNBC, CSPAN, NPR, Time, CNN.com and
Salon.com, in addition to USA TODAY.
He is senior fellow at Demos, a nonpartisan, multi-issue think tank that focuses
on domestic and global issues. Benjamin has held teaching and research positions
at Stanford University, Brown University and the Columbia University School
of Law.

Books:Searching
for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America, winner
of a 2009 Editor's Choice Award from Booklist and the American Library Association.

Background: Campbell
has spent more than 30 years in journalism, including nearly two decades as
a Washington reporter, editor and columnist for Gannett
Newspapers and USA TODAY. He also served as director of the Washington Journalism
Center and of a fellowship program for journalists newly assigned to Washington.
He has taught journalism at Northwestern
University, the University of Oregon, Arizona State University and Emory
University in Atlanta.

Books:Inside
the Beltway: A Guide to Washington Reporting (2003).

Katherine
Chretien

Katherine
Chretien is an internist who focuses on inpatient care and is an associate professor
of medicine at George Washington University.

Expertise: Medicine,
health care, parenting, military families

Background: Chretien
practices hospital medicine at the Washington D.C. Veterans Affairs Medical
Center and helps train the next generation of doctors. She is nationally known
for her research on social media and medicine. She writes a humor column on
parenting at Momicillin.com and previously was a freelance humor writer for
Disney. Chretien is a graduate of Brown University, Johns Hopkins School of
Medicine, and completed internal medicine training at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
She and her husband, an active-duty Navy officer, have three children.

Expertise: International
and national finance and the economy — particularly how big global economic
trends bear on people's everyday lives.

Background: Fishman's
work has appeared in many prominent publications, including The New York
Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Harper's, Esquire, USA TODAY, National
Geographic, GQ, The Times of London, Money, Worth and Inc.
His commentaries have been featured on Public Radio International's This
American Life and American Public Media's Marketplace. He is also
a former floor trader and member of the Chicago
Mercantile Exchange, where he ran his own trading firm. He has lived and
worked in Japan and Indonesia.

Books:China,
Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World (2005).

Annette
Fuentes is an editor at New America Media, an Internet-based news service with
a primarily ethnic and immigrant media audience.

Expertise: Education,
health care and social welfare policies.

Background: Fuentes
was a health reporter for the New York Daily News, an assistant editor
for op-eds at Newsday, the Metro editor at the Village Voice,
and an editorial writer and columnist at El Diario/La Prensa, New York
City's largest Spanish-language daily newspaper. She was on the faculty of the
Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia
University before moving to New America Media.

Books: Co-author
with Barbara
Ehrenreich of Women in the Global Factory. Author of a forthcoming
book on public school security and disciplinary policy.

Jonah
Goldberg

Jonah
Goldberg is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and editor-at-large
of National Review Online.

Expertise: Politics,
culture, foreign affairs.

Background: Goldberg
previously served as a columnist for The Times of London, Brill's
Content and The American, the journal of the American
Enterprise Institute. His writings have appeared in The Washington Post,
The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, Commentary, The New
Yorker, Food and Wine, and numerous other publications. He is currently
a Fox
News contributor and previously served as analyst for CNN.

Books:Liberal
Facism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini
to the Politics of Change.

Ernest
(Sandy) Grady

Sandy
Grady is a longtime political and sports columnist.

Expertise: Sports
and politics.

Background:
Grady spent half his career covering major sports events, the last half writing
about Washington politics. He was born in Charlotte and was a teenage reporter
on the now-vanished Charlotte News. After tours with the U.S. Navy in
the Pacific and a stint at the University of North Carolina, he was a sports
columnist for The Bulletin of Philadelphia. Then as a syndicated columnist,
he covered seven presidents and 16 national conventions.

Background: Jans,
a contributing editor to Alaska magazine, has written hundreds of magazine
articles and contributed to many anthologies. His range includes poetry, short
fiction, literary essays, natural history, adventure and political commentary.
Jans has also been the recipient of numerous writing awards, most recently the
co-winner of two Ben
Franklin Medals (2007 and 2008) and a Rasmuson Fellowship (2009). A Juneau
resident since 1999, Jans also lived for many years in Ambler, the arctic Inupiaq
village, where he taught the village schoolchildren.

Background: Kluger
also frequently writes about fatherhood for Parenting magazine and is
a regular contributor to National
Public Radio's All Things Considered, the Los Angeles Times, Psychology
Today, Time Out New York and The Huffington Post. He's formerly an
editor of Playboy magazine and a DVD reviewer for Us Weekly.

Books: Co-author,
with David Tabatsky, of Dear President Obama:
Letters of Hope from Children Across America.

Background: A
former news reporter for the Associated Press and The Orange County Register,
Krattenmaker has a master's degree in religion in public life from the University
of Pennsylvania and has written religion commentaries and articles for Salon,
the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Oregonian.

Robert
Lipsyte is a longtime sports columnist, author and TV show host.

Expertise: Sports,
aging, young adults.

Background: Lipsyte
is host of Life (Part2), a weekly PBS
show on aging. A longtime city and sports columnist of The New York Times,
in 1966 and in 1996, he won Columbia University's Meyer Berger Award for distinguished
reporting. In 1992, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary.
In June 2001, he won the American
Library Association's Margaret A. Edwards' award for lifetime achievement
in young adult literature. Lipsyte won an Emmy in 1990 for on-camera achievement
as host of the nightly WNET public affairs broadcast The Eleventh Hour.

Books: Author
of 16 books, including In the Country of Illness: Comfort and Advice for
the Journey; SportsWorld: An American Dreamland; and such young adult
novels as The Contender, One Fat Summer and Raiders Night.
His forthcoming memoir is called Lessons From the Locker-Room: The Education
of an Accidental Sportswriter.

Sheryl
McCarthy is Distinguished Lecturer in Journalism at Queens College of the City
University of New York.

Expertise: Social
and political issues, including race and gender issues, social policies towards
the poor, the vagaries of the criminal justice system, education, politics and
foreign policy.

Background: McCarthy
also is host of One to One, a weekly public affairs talk show on CUNY-TV,
the university's cable-TV station. She was a columnist for Newsday and
New York Newsday for 18 years, and before that was a correspondent for
ABC News and a reporter and education editor for the New York Daily News.
Her articles have appeared in The Nation and Ms. magazine. McCarthy
graduated from Mount
Holyoke College and received master's and law degrees from Columbia University.

Books:Why
Are the Heroes
Always White? , a collection of her New York Newsday columns.

Diane
McWhorter

Diane
McWhorter is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

Expertise: Race
and politics.

Background: McWhorter's
work has appeared in The New York Times, People, Slate, The American Scholar,
Harper's and Boston Magazine, where she was managing editor. She
has been a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and is a 2009 Guggenheim
fellow. McWhorter grew up in Birmingham, Ala. She began her journalism career
in Boston after graduating from Wellesley
College with a B.A. in Comparative Literature. She now lives with her family
in New York City and is at work on a new book.

Books:Carry
Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama — The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights
Revolution, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and
the J.
Anthony Lukas Book Prize, among other awards. A Dream of Freedom,
her young-adult history of the civil rights movement.

Tony
Mauro

Tony
Mauro is Supreme Court correspondent for The National Law Journal, Incisive
Media and law.com.

Expertise: U.S.
Supreme Court, law.

Background: Mauro
has covered the Supreme Court for 29 years, first for Gannett
News Service and USA TODAY and then, since January 2000, for Legal Times,
which merged with its sibling publication The National Law Journal in
2009. He also blogs about the Supreme Court at The BLT. Mauro serves
on the executive committee of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
He received a bachelor's degree in political science from Rutgers University
and a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Books:Illustrated
Great Decisions of the Supreme Court. He also has contributed chapters to
several books, the most recent is A Good Quarrel: America's Top Legal Reporters
Share Stories from Inside the Supreme Court.

Michael
Medved

Michael
Medved is a nationally syndicated radio host, best-selling author and veteran
film critic.

Expertise: Politics
and entertainment.

Background: His
daily three-hour broadcast from Seattle reaches more than 4 million listeners
on more than 200 stations across the country. Medved attended Yale Law School
(where his classmates included Bill and Hillary Clinton) before going to work
as a political speech writer and consultant for a variety of liberal candidates
and officeholders.

Books: Medved
has written 12 non-fiction books, including best-seller What Really Happened
to the Class of '65?, Hospital, Hollywood vs. America, Right
Turns, The 10 Big Lies About America and most recently The 5 Big
Lies About American Business.

Philip
Meyer was the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina-Chapel
Hill until he retired in 2008.

Expertise: Journalism.

Background: Meyer
has reported for The Topeka Daily Capital, The Miami Herald and
the Knight
Ridder Washington Bureau. In 1967, he was detached from Washington to the
Detroit Free Press to report on the Detroit riot. His use of social science
research methods, learned in Harvard's Nieman Fellowship program, helped the
Free Press staff win the Pulitzer Prize for general local reporting.
Meyer is a fellow of the Society
of Professional Journalists and a past president of the American Association
for Public Opinion Research.

Books:Precision
Journalism (the fourth edition was published in 2002). The Vanishing
Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age.

Ruben
Navarrette Jr.

Ruben
Navarrette Jr. is a nationally syndicated columnist with The Washington Post
Writers Group, a CNN.COM contributor and a commentator for National Public Radio.

Expertise: Immigration,
politics, culture. A native of California's Central Valley, Navarrette previously
co-hosted a daily radio show in Los Angeles, and served on the editorial boards
of both The Dallas Morning News and The San Diego Union-Tribune.
He also worked a reporter and metro columnist for The Arizona Republic.
His writings have appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street
Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Texas
Monthly, Hispanic magazine and numerous other publications. He appears
often on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, and, during the 2008 election, served as a
panelist on the PBS' All-American Democratic Presidential Forum.

Background: Before
starting USA TODAY in 1982, Neuharth built its parent company, Gannett, into
the nation's largest newspaper company. He went on to found the Freedom Forum,
a charitable foundation that champions the First Amendment, and its Newseum,
a museum of news in Washington, D.C. that is a popular tourist attraction. A
native of South Dakota, Neuharth now resides in Cocoa Beach, Fla. His weekly
"Plain Talk" column has appeared in USA TODAY since 1988.

Books:
Confessions of an S.O.B., Free Spirit, Nearly One World,
Plain Talk Across the USA, Profiles of Power, Truly One Nation,
Window on the World, World Power Up Close

Alcestis
"Cooky" Oberg

Alcestis
"Cooky" Oberg is a veteran freelance author and writer, specializing in science
and technology.

Expertise: In
addition to space, science and technology, Oberg has written on a wide range
of subjects, including medicine, education, law, gardening, parenting and family.
Background: In her long career as a journalist, Oberg covered NASA for 25 years.
She is married to noted author and space consultant James Oberg, who spent 22
years as a space engineer at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Among her
more interesting accomplishments include being named a semi-finalist for NASA's
Journalist-in-Space program (cancelled after the Challenger disaster) in 1986
and being a certified Master Gardener.

Books:Spacefarers
of the '80s and '90s: The Next Thousand People in Space; The Butterflies
of Galveston County: What Every Gardener Needs to Know; and co-author with
her husband of Pioneering Space: Living on the Next Frontier. She has
also co-authored and edited numerous horticulture books in recent years.

Background: Parker,
the winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, is a veteran journalist
of more than 30 years. She has worked for half a dozen newspaper and written
for numerous magazines. Her twice-weekly opinion column, which won her the 1993
H.L. Mencken Writing Award, runs in more than 400 newspapers, making her the
most widely distributed female columnist in the U.S. She divides her time between
Camden, S.C., and Washington, D.C.

Books:Save
the Males.

Ken
Paulson

Ken
Paulson is the president and CEO of the First Amendment Center.

Expertise: First
Amendment, the news media

Background: Paulson
is a journalist and lawyer, the editor of USA TODAY from 2004-2009 and former
executive director of the First Amendment Center. He has a journalism degree
from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the University of Illinois
College of Law, and is a member of the Illinois and Florida Bars. He was also
the host of the Emmy-honored national television program Speaking Freely.

David
Person

David
Person is a longtime journalist and talk show host.

Expertise: Politics
and the South.

Background: Person
hosts WEUP Talk, a daily call-in talk show for WEUP-AM, the oldest black-owned
radio station in Alabama. Person also blogs twice a month for Adventist Today,
a website that features news, analysis and opinion about current events and
issues of interest to Seventh-day Adventists. In March 2009, Person retired
as an editorial writer and columnist at The Huntsville (Ala.) Times,
where his writing earned awards from the Alabama Press Association and the Alabama
Associated Press. He has also done feature reporting for National Public Radio's
Present at the Creation series and the Tavis Smiley show.

Kevin Pho

Kevin
Pho is a practicing primary care physician in Nashua, N.H.

Expertise: Medicine,
health care.

Background: Pho
is among the Web's leading physician voices and publishes medical commentary
at KevinMD.com, voted the Best Medical Blog of 2008. He has appeared on the
CBS Evening News and in The New York Times, CNN, Forbes.com,
NPR, SmartMoney magazine and The Wall Street Journal. Pho is board-certified
in Internal Medicine. He graduated from Boston University School of Medicine
and completed residency training at Boston Medical Center.

Kirsten
Powers is a columnist for the Daily Beast and a Fox News political analyst.

Expertise: Politics,
culture, women's rights/feminism, faith.

Background: Powers
previously served in the Clinton White House as a press aide to U.S. Trade Representative
Mickey Kantor. She also worked in New York state and city Democratic politics
-- including as Andrew Cuomo's press secretary during his 2002 governor's race.
She has consulted for organizations such as the National
Council for Research on Women and Human Rights First. Her writing has been
published in USA TODAY, Elle magazine, the New York Post,
the Wall Street Journal, the New York Observer, Salon.com,
and American Prospect Online.

Background: A
third-generation Mexican American, Reyes writes frequently on issues affecting
the Latino community. Reyes is a contributor to CNN and National Public Radio's
Latino USA. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles
Times, Houston Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, Texas Monthly, Hispanic
magazine and numerous Spanish language-newspapers. Reyes is a graduate of Harvard
University and Columbia School of Law.

Marc
Siegel is a practicing internist and associate professor of medicine at New
York University's Langone Medical Center.

Expertise: Medicine,
health care, epidemics.

Background: Siegel
is the medical director of Doctor Radio for Sirius/XM and NYU Langone.
He is a graduate of Brown University and SUNY Buffalo School of Medicine.

Books: Siegel
is also the author of Bellevue, a novel; False Alarm: The Truth About
the Epidemic of Fear; and Bird Flu: Everything You Need to Know About
the Next Pandemic.

Lewis
M. Simons

Lewis
M. Simons is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author.

Expertise: Asia,
Islam, war, civil unrest.

Background: Simons
began his career as a foreign correspondent in Vietnam,
at the height of the war. He has reported from throughout Asia, the Middle East
and the former Soviet Union. He won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting
for exposing the billions that the Marcos family looted from the Philippines.
He was twice more a Pulitzer finalist and has received numerous other journalism
awards. Simons' articles have appeared in USA TODAY, The New York Times,
Washington Post; Foreign Affairs, National Geographic,
Atlantic, and Smithsonian magazines; Huffington Post, Daily Beast
and Daily Kos. He has appeared on ABC, NBC,
MSNBC,
CNN and NPR.

Mary
Zeiss Stange is a professor of women's studies and religion at Skidmore College
in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Expertise: Religion,
women and feminism, environment, hunting and other political and social issues.

Background: Stange
leads something of a double life — college teaching in Upstate New York,
and ranching and hunting in Montana, where she and her husband, Doug, operate
the Crazy Woman Bison Ranch. She holds a B.A. in English literature, and an
M.A. and Ph.D. in religion, from Syracuse University.

Books:Woman
the Hunter, the first cultural history of the relationship of women and
hunting; Gun Women: Firearms and Feminism in Contemporary America; Heart
Shots: Women Write about Hunting; and the forthcoming Hard Grass: Life
on the Crazy Woman Bison Ranch.

Oliver
"Buzz" Thomas

Oliver
"Buzz" Thomas is an attorney and Baptist minister.

Expertise: Religion
and law.

Background: Thomas
has practiced at every level of state and federal court, including the U.S.
Supreme Court. He has been a parish minister, general counsel to the Baptist
Joint Committee, special counsel for religious and civil liberties to the National
Council of Churches, a consultant to the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt
University and litigation director of the Knoxville Legal Aid Society. He
has appeared as an expert witness before the Judiciary Committees of both chambers
of the United States Congress as well as before state legislatures. He has been
a guest commentator on major media outlets such as C-Span,
CNN and National Public Radio.

Books:10
Things Your Minister Wants to Tell You (But Can't Because He Needs the Job).

Katrina Trinko

Katrina
Trinko is a writer based in New York City.

Expertise:
Politics, campaigns, education and culture

Background: Trinko
is currently a reporter for National Review Online, focusing on campaigns and
national politics. Previously, she held a fellowship at USA TODAYs editorial
department and reported for Philadelphia newspaper The Bulletin. Trinko is a
Publius Fellow at the Claremont Institute, and a graduate of Thomas Aquinas
College.

Background: Professor
Turley holds the prestigious Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law at George
Washington University. He has served as counsel in some of the most notable
cases in the last two decades, representing whistle-blowers, military personnel
and a wide range of other clients. Turley is a frequent witness before the House
and Senate on constitutional and statutory issues as well as tort reform legislation.
He is also a nationally recognized legal commentator who appears regularly on
all of the major television networks. Turley received his B.A. at the University
of Chicago and his J.D. at Northwestern.

Laura
Vanderkam

Laura
Vanderkam is an author and freelance writer.

Expertise: Social
trends, economics, careers and education, in addition to other topics.

Background: Vanderkam
began writing columns for USA TODAY as an intern at the newspaper in 2001. Her
work has also appeared in Scientific
American, City Journal, Wired, Reader's Digest and The Wall Street
Journal. She was the recipient of a 2006-07 Phillips Journalism Fellowship
and lives in New York City.

Books: She
is the author of the forthcoming 168 Hours and of Grindhopping: Build
a Rewarding Career without Paying Your Dues, which looked at the rise in
self-employment among young Americans.

Alan
Webber is a writer, editor, author and co-founder of Fast Company magazine.

Expertise: Business,
technology, economy, information, leadership.

Background: Webber
and William Taylor launched Fast Company business magazine, which won
national magazine awards for excellence and for design. He was named Adweek's
Editor of the Year in 1999, along with Taylor. Before Fast Company, Webber
was the managing editor and editorial director of the Harvard Business Review.
His columns and articles have appeared in numerous national publications, including
the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The New York Times Sunday Magazine
and The Washington Post. He has worked in the public sector as a
special assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Transportation and in several capacities
for the city of Portland.

Books: Most
recently, Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing
Your Self; Going Global; and Changing Alliances.

Patrick
Welsh

Patrick
Welsh is a longtime high school English teacher.

Expertise: Education
from the ground floor.

Background: Welsh
teaches English at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va. The school's
struggles with integration in 1971, Welsh's second year there, were portrayed
in the Denzel Washington film Remember
the Titans. Currently, T.C. Williams has 2,100 students of every racial,
ethnic and socioeconomic group imaginable, including students from more than
100 countries, many of them refugees. His writing on education and the youth
culture has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsweek
and other publications. He is a graduate of Canisius
College and the George Washington University Law School, and is a member
of the Virginia State Bar.

Books:Tales
Out of School.

DeWayne Wickham

DeWayne
Wickham is a veteran print columnist who also has worked as a commentator for
CBS News, Black Entertainment News and the Tom Joyner Morning Show.

Expertise: Politics
and race relations in the United States and abroad.

Background: Wickham
has extensive knowledge about the interplay between race and politics. He's
also reported from every corner of the United States and from many foreign countries
including Cuba, Jamaica, France, Canada, Haiti, Germany and Venezuela over a
journalism career that's spanned more than three decades. A founding member
and fomer president of the National Association of Black Journalists, he currently
serves as director of the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies at North
Carolina A&T State University.

To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.